Marcus Berkmann | The Spectator columnists & writers

Elephants walk on tiptoes — but can they dance? This year’s stocking-fillers explore such puzzles

It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that, should you be given one of these for Christmas by the aunt who hates you or the brother who merely despises you, you might actually enjoy it — more than the acrylic scarf or the comedy socks that I always get from my least favourite relatives, anyway. What with one thing and another, there are roughly four million new books by comedians, all written during lockdown when there was nothing else to do. The best I read was Bob Mortimer’s sweet, elegiac memoir And Away... (Gallery Books, £20), which tells of how an impossibly shy solicitor saw Vic Reeves performing on the tiny stage of a south London pub, was entranced by his comic brilliance and got involved in the show, first as a sidekick and later as a fully fledged partner-in-laffs.

A load of oddballs: the eccentricities of past cricketing heroes

For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a distance, was Sir John Major’s plodding effort, a labour of love to write, I’m sure, but a real labour to read. One of the most astute was Sir Derek Birley’s magisterial A Social History of English Cricket. It apparently helps to be a knight of the realm if you wish to get your cricketing history into hard covers. Richard H. Thomas isn’t there yet — he’s an associate professor of journalism at Swansea university — but his book is so absorbing and entertaining I would be surprised if the offer of at least a CBE wasn’t already in the post. For Thomas has done something unusual but actually very simple and effective.

Has the vaccine cured my long Covid?

Everyone has their own Covid-19 story, and here’s mine. I caught it in Marks & Spencer in late March last year, when 200 clearly deranged panic-buyers set about stripping the store of its every last ready meal. Web designers grasping the last known packet of Our Best Ever Prawn Cocktail, estate agents fighting over the gooseberry and elderflower yoghurts: it felt like the end of times, and was actually one of the scariest experiences I have ever had. My friend Russell got it at around the same point at his daughter’s PTA meeting. He spent five weeks in hospital. Another parent died. There were four of us in this small flat. We knew if one of us got it, we all would. It was my daughter Martha, aged 20, who first started showing symptoms.

Is it too late to save cricket?

The news that cricket is returning to Channel 4 for the forthcoming series between India and England has been greeted with relief by cricket fans and absolute mystification by everyone else. In 2005, after the greatest Ashes series any of us will ever see, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) signed a long-term deal with Sky Sports, which made the ECB a fortune and blew a huge hole in cricket’s potential television audience. To this day I have cricket-mad friends who refuse to sign up to Sky Sports, either because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch or because it’s so bloody expensive, or possibly both. It costs me about £1000 a year to watch cricket on Sky, and it’s no consolation to know that the money has gone from me to Virgin Media to Rupert to the ECB to line the pockets of England players, who are now much better remunerated thanks to the Sky deal.

The magnificence of the Covid ‘business lunch’ loophole

A friend of mine went for a walk in the Cotswolds last weekend with his wife. At around four o’clock, tired but happy, they fetched up at a country pub. ‘You’ll have to eat a substantial meal,’ said the landlady, crossly. ‘But it’s four o’clock,’ said my friend. ‘We’re not hungry.’ The landlady tutted and showed him a long and expensive menu. My friend and his wife turned around and walked out of the pub. This, I think we can safely say, represents one end of the Tier 2 pub spectrum. At the other is a pub I know which used to be up the road from the local police station. This pub had, and continues to have, a famously good relationship with the rozzers: late-night lock-ins have long been a speciality. This pub is open but does not appear to be serving any food at all.

Gift books for Christmas — reviewed by Marcus Berkmann

We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as real books. This is a rare and beautiful thing. What Cats Want (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is by Dr Yuki Hattori, billed here as ‘Japan’s leading cat doctor’, as though anyone is going to argue with that. It’s simply a guide to understanding your cat — clear, concise, very pleasingly designed and with some lovely, quintessentially Japanese illustrations, mainly of cats. Of course, if you don’t like cats it’s really not going to help you very much; but for those of us who are at least partially obsessed by these beautiful, mysterious, bird-butchering, bum-licking creatures who don’t think they are masters of the house, but know it for certain, this is a delightful and genuinely useful little book.

Why are so many people still going to the pub?

Pubs are fascinating at the moment. On the day that the Prime Minister advised us not to attend them, I turned up at one in leafy Highgate, London N6 to find it much fuller than you might expect. I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing. People are still getting out, having a jolly time — but carefully. At the Woodman earlier this week, while I sat alone with my book and a drink, everyone was very politely giving each other a metre of space because that’s now the done thing. One couple, in the early stages of courtship, were wondering how close they could get to each other. She was keen. He was less so. I’d dump him, if I were her. In France, Spain and Italy all bars and restaurants have been closed and everyone has been ordered to stay at home.

The unwritten rules of sending Christmas cards

No one sends Christmas cards any more. Except that I do, and you might, and a few other people do too. But overall, cards have become so expensive, time-consuming and, let’s admit it, unfashionable that many people have abandoned them with some relief. Some of them rather piously tell us the money thus saved is now going to charity. Others, even more piously, say they are no longer sending cards because of the waste of planetary resources, and they now prefer more ecologically sustainable methods of celebrating Christmas. These are often the people who then fly to New York to go Christmas shopping. I love cards. I like buying them, I like writing them, and most of all, I like receiving them. The first cards usually arrive in the first week of December, months after the first Christmas ads and several weeks after we have first heard Mariah Carey singing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ in a high-street shop.

Children’s questions about death are consistently good fun

What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them is to hope beyond hope that this will be the year for you, the year that your not-very-good book will become a bestseller and buy you everything you want and need, and that no one will notice its manifest flaws until it’s far too late. Or maybe not; because every year a few decent titles do somehow manage to peek through the clouds. These are the ones that genuinely deserve to be bought, read and loved.

The lessons I learned at my Oxford gaudy

I went to a gaudy last weekend. Several British universities now host these splendid events; mine was at Worcester College, Oxford, from where I graduated in 1981 with a double third in mathematics. A gaudy is essentially a reunion weekend with knobs on. At Worcester they are blessedly free, which is great for paups like me who can enjoy the exceptionally good food and, particularly, wine with a huge stupid smile. (The only cost was £42 for a guest room for a night, and my God do you need that.) Gaudies typically occur for each year’s intake only every seven years, and when you get the invitation you need to respond by return, because if you don’t you won’t get in. I won’t pretend that I didn’t have rather complicated feelings about either my college or my course.

The elegance and humour of Neville Cardus

As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can that be? He was, in his lifetime, the doyen of cricket writers, mainly because he effectively invented the form. Before he started writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1919, cricket journalists reported the score and little else. And what little else, you could probably have done without. As Duncan Hamilton says in his biography: Before Cardus, there were cricket writers who still called the ball ‘the crimson rambler’, referred to the wicketkeeper as ‘the custodian of the gauntlets’ and saw the ball speed ‘across the greensward’, as though the vocabulary of Merrie Olde England had never gone away.

Cricket’s guilty men: my list of who deserves to be sacked for the Ashes debacle

I suppose the question is who we sack first. For like many, if not most England fans, I am at a stage beyond rage, beyond reasonable doubt, beyond all good sense. I want blood. As a friend of mine who supports Everton posted on Facebook this morning, ‘Name two seven-letter sports teams beginning with E who will always let you down.’ The candidates for the chop are as follows: 1. Jason Roy as opening batsman. Dear god, I could do better. My old friend Simon, who used to open for the team I play for, could do better. He played 252 games for us and averages just over seven. He has just one shot, a smear down to third man. That’s one shot more than Jason Roy, unless you count the firm-footed edge to the wicketkeeper.

Top of the Christmas lists

The ‘gift books’ are out again, piled high in Waterstones, books that have only one reason to exist: to be given to people who don’t want them on Christmas Day. Having written one or two myself, I have seen the look on the faces of potential purchasers as they pick one up and leaf idly through its well-crafted pages. The look that says: whose Yuletide can we ruin with this? As ever, happily, there are a few genuinely decent books in among all the drivel and nonsense and tired jokes about Brexit and Donald Trump. The Spectator’s own Mark Mason is a long-serving truffler of trivial facts, which he often frames within some sort of weird travelogue: in one book he walked between every London underground station, just because he could.

Question time | 25 January 2018

Last year was a bit of a year for Radio 4 anniversaries; maybe most notably, Desert Island Discs celebrated 70 years on air. But oddly enough, so did another show. Round Britain Quiz, which you may remember vaguely from your childhood, or possibly your parents’ childhood, also reached 70 in 2017. There have been one or two breaks, but this abstruse and, let’s face it, unashamedly smart show has survived the slings and arrows of outrageous Radio 4 controllers. Every year we fret and worry, hoping beyond hope that it will be recommissioned. Every year, I’m glad to say, it is. I say ‘we’ because, for the past few years, I have been part of the merry crew that makes the programme. It’s one of the very best jobs in the world.

Fiendishly puzzling

There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on his desk exuding yuletide jollity. But this year’s aren’t bad at all. Some are serious works of quasi-academic research, others are tooth-pullingly funny and one or two are utterly bizarre. For sheer magnificent pointlessness, you should look no further than Great British Pub Dogs by Abbie Lucas and Paul Fleckney (Robinson, £12.99). Lucas (a photographer) and Fleckney (a journalist) have, for no doubt pressing reasons of their own, roamed the nation to identify the ‘wonderful variety’ of Britain’s pub- dwelling dogs. Oh, and one pig, Frances Bacon. One pub had three Jack Russells, another had four red setters, and a third had a bulldog that spun like a ballerina.

More matter with less art

When A.A. Gill died last December, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth across the nation. I must admit this came as a surprise to me, but then I hadn’t read him for many years, having developed a ferocious dislike for the Sunday Times too long ago now to remember quite why. My memories of him were of an outrageous show pony, a wordsmith of great talent but surprisingly little taste, who essentially wrote about himself and his wonderful life (in the guise of restaurant and television reviews) in a needy, look-at-me, sub-Clarkson kind of way. He seemed to me to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the paper he wrote for, whatever that turns out to have been. But people were genuinely upset when he died, and not just because he was by all accounts a good egg.

Corduroy

Every Christmas, I ask my loved ones for at least two pairs of corduroy trousers. Off with a sigh tramps my girlfriend, who knows that fashion cycles dictate that corduroy will be ‘in’, and therefore purchasable, only every fourth or fifth year or so. For three or four years corduroy will be invisible. Shop assistants will look askance at anyone who dares even mention it. Then corduroy is rediscovered by whoever decides these things, and it’s everywhere. Cushions are in corduroy. Dogs wear corduroy. I saw a corduroy tie the other day. At such times we corduroy lovers stock up, conscious of the long corduroy-free winter that will inevitably follow. I bought my first two pairs of corduroy trousers in 1979, when I was at university.

Pub quizzes

For more than 20 years now, I have been trudging up the hill to the Prince of Wales in Highgate on Tuesday evenings to take part in that tiny pub’s venerable weekly quiz. Each evening promises something different and yet somehow the same: ferocious competition, ridiculous arguments over the answer to question four, several glasses of red wine and usually, during round three, a few packets of Sweet Thai Chilli Sensations crisps. The quiz is unusual in that it is set by its regulars, and my next turn behind the microphone will be on St Valentine’s Day. (This is always a good night for us; most people will do anything to avoid it.) It will be the 178th quiz I have hosted there. That’s more than 8,000 questions, allowing for the odd repeat.

Spectator Books of the Year: The story that’s too funny for the Man Booker Prize

I loved Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99). It’s a short, characteristically oblique story of a young woman in southern Spain with her crapulous mother, there to attend a dodgy-sounding, marble-adorned medical establishment where they hope to find — at last — a cure for the mother’s inability to walk. It’s no surprise it didn’t win the Man Booker prize, because as well as being elegant and deeply strange, it’s hummingly funny throughout. As we all know, prize juries regard jokes as a distinct disadvantage. I’m reviewing the year’s cricket books at the moment for next April’s Wisden, and the outstanding volume so far has been The Grade Cricketer, by Dave Edwards, Sam Perry and Ian Higgins (Melbourne Books, £14.

Christmas stocking fillers

The gift books come in all shapes and sizes this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat and thin, rather like their writers, I would guess. Biggest and fattest of them all is The Art of Aardman (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). This is a coffee-table book, pure and simple, that celebrates 40 years of animation at Aardman Studios, who make Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and others, and I would suggest that you have known since the beginning of this sentence whether or not you want this book for Christmas. It’s everything you would wish for from such a volume, featuring stills from the films, drawings from the animators’ sketchbooks, portraits of sets, technical drawings for props, manifold character studies and very, very few words indeed.

Too much glam

This mighty volume begs a question, although it doesn’t ask it, let alone answer it. Does anyone in the known universe really want to read 650 pages about glam rock? Simon Reynolds must do, because that’s how much he has written on the subject. All writers, if we are to be honest, write books because they themselves wish to read them. But what if you are the only person who wants to read it? It scarcely bears thinking about. Glam rock, as older readers may remember, was a phase of particularly visual and mascara-inflected pop that dominated Top of the Pops for a couple of years in the early 1970s. Before that, we had chug-a-chug blues rock and earnest singer-songwriters, and everyone had hair down to here. Afterwards, there were two or three awkward years while we waited for punk to turn up.

Introducing The Spectator Book of Wit, Humour and Mischief

Even now, I’m not sure I can believe it has actually happened. The Spectator Book of Wit, Humour and Mischief was conceived, possibly over lunch, as a belated follow-up to Christopher Howse’s 1990 volume The Wit Of The Spectator, and as the first of a putative series of themed books using the vast and rarely tapped resource of the Spectator archive. My friend and publisher Richard Beswick and I pitched the idea to the magazine’s seniors, and they embraced it with enthusiasm. They gave me the run of the website and the digitised archive, but being the sort of person who writes for The Spectator, I favoured a more old-fashioned approach. I asked if I might come into the office once a week and leaf through binders of old magazines, prospecting for gold.

El Sid

Was there life before darts? I am old enough, just about, to remember such a time. One minute, in or around 1978, there was no darts on TV. Next minute, there was nothing else, and Eric Bristow, if he had felt inclined to stand, would have been elected prime minister by a landslide. As with snooker, the glory years of mass popularity were but brief, but once established as the chosen sporting endeavour of people who don’t like moving too quickly, darts retained a substantial fan base, and continues to thrive even in these slimmer and more austere times. There really is something to be said for a sport whose greatest exponent, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, looks like a man who has sat on the same bar stool every night for 35 years, eating pork scratchings and sounding off about Top Gear.

Starman

The DJ and sage Mark Radcliffe once said that he didn’t think he could ever like anyone who didn’t love David Bowie’s song ‘Heroes’, and while that might be going a bit far, I can see what he means. As it happens, ‘Heroes’ is still my favourite Bowie song, and Low and Heroes are still my favourite albums, slightly more than 38 years after they were first released. No one told us when we were teenagers that our barely formed music tastes would stay with us for the rest of our lives, but if we didn’t even suspect it then, we know it for certain now. If you do have to die, though, you might as well do it as Bowie has just done, without anyone outside your intimate circle having an inkling and thus with dignity and integrity intact.

Spectator books of the year: Marcus Berkmann on two perfectly-pitched comedies

Nothing makes me happier than a perfectly pitched comic novel, and this year I chanced upon two. Kate Clanchy’s Meeting the English (Picador, £16.99) introduces a young Scottish Candide into upper-middle-class arty north London, where his goodness and common sense are buffeted by the blinding self-absorption of the other characters. This is social comedy so warming and nutritious, so fresh and elegantly executed, it comes as rather a surprise to learn that this is Clanchy’s first novel. It’s probably not compulsory to live in north London to enjoy it, although I have to admit I have given it as a present to several friends who are inclined to regard Hampstead Heath as the centre of the universe. Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat (Gallic, £8.

Curiosities for Christmas

There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there really should be. But what would we call it? Trivia sounds too trivial. Loo Books sounds too lavatorial. Books for the Man or Woman who Has Everything, Except this Book is probably closest, but might need editing. Whatever we decide to call them, there is an unusually fine crop this year, and several are historically inclined. Gimson’s Kings and Queens (Square Peg, £10.99) is subtitled Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066, and gives us exactly that, in Andrew Gimson’s characteristically elegant and entertaining prose. ‘There are many admirable biographies of individual monarchs. But I do not know of a recent, readable volume which covers them all in under 250 pages.

Why I’m stepping down after 28 years as The Spectator pop critic

This is my 345th and last monthly column about pop music for The Spectator. I believe I might be the third-longest continuously serving columnist here, after Taki and Peter Phillips. Others have been writing for the magazine for longer, but have occasionally been given time off for good behaviour. You may be astounded to learn that I have not been fired. I, certainly, am astounded. I have been waiting for the tap on the shoulder, or maybe the firm but regretful email, since my first column in May 1987. Eventually I came to realise that the less the editor of the time was interested in my subject, the safer I was. As sheer delight in survival morphed into freakish longevity, I decided it was best to maintain a low profile, to the extent that when the 25th anniversary of the column loomed a couple of years ago, I asked Liz Anderson, legendary arts editor and tireless moral support to any number of anxious columnists, to say nothing to anyone.

Going for a song | 10 September 2015

This column does like a bargain. Indeed, it not only esteems and relishes a bargain, it has also worked long and hard to prove Milton Friedman wrong. Sometimes there really is such a thing as a free lunch. And for those of us still wedded to the notion of owning music on some kind of solid, tangible medium (vinyl, CD, dusty box of cassettes at back of cupboard), these are great, cheapskate-friendly years in which to be alive. Almost every song ever recorded can be bought for a song. And still we mothwallets can claim the moral high ground, because we’re not actually stealing it, unlike everyone under 40. As Fagin once sang, ‘In this life, one thing counts. In the bank, large amounts.’ It was probably inevitable, then, that I would be drawn to the record companies’ latest wheeze for making the most of their now vast and lumbering back catalogues.

Music for the masses

As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of opening the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Doggett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular. What music did people like? Why did they like it? What did it bring to their lives? Doggett has previously written books about Bowie, the Beatles and 1960s counterculture, all with very long titles that suggest deep learning and limited readability.

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